Mrs. Laithe rode over to apprise Ewing of this plan. The little clearing slept vacant in the sunlight. She left Cooney "tied to the ground" by throwing the bridle rein over his head, and knocked on the open door of the cabin with the handle of her quirt. There was no response save echoes from the empty living room. Crossing this she drew aside the blanket that curtained the door of the studio. The big room lay before her in strange disorder. Pictures and hangings were gone from the wall. Two yawning trunks stood by the door; canvases and portfolios lay about; loose drawings and clothing littered the chairs and floor. Beyond this disarray stood the easel, still holding the mother's portrait. In the light from the window the eyes looked livingly into her own through the silence. She was struck by some new glint of meaning in them, something she read as an appeal, almost a prayer. Her own eyes fell and then she first noticed the room's living occupant. On the couch, in the shadow of the half-drawn curtain, Ewing lay asleep. He had sprawled there easily, half turned on his side, one arm flung about his head, the other hanging over to the floor. Now that she saw him she heard his measured breathing. Some new, quick-born interest--curiosity, sympathy, she knew not what--impelled her to scan the sleeping face more closely. She stepped lightly across to the couch and looked down at him, with a little air of carelessness against his sudden awakening. It was the first time she had studied his face in repose. Lacking the ready, boyish smile, it was an older face, revealing lines of maturity she had not suspected in the arch of brow above the deep-set eyes, in the lean jaws and sharply square chin, and in the muscled neck, revealed by the thrown-back head. It was a new face, for the unguarded faces of the sleeping, like the faces of the dead tell many secrets. Ewing's face was all at once full of new suggestion, of new depths, of unsuspected complexities. As she gazed, scarce breathing, she was alive to a new consciousness of him. He had been a boy, winning from her at once by his fresh, elemental humanness a regard that came partly from the mother lying alert in her, and partly from the joyous, willing and even wistful comrade which this woman was fitted to be. Now, bending over the unmasked face, she divined with swift alarm that her old careless attitude toward the sleeper might never be recovered. What her new attitude must be she could not yet know, but she was conscious of being swept by a great wave of tenderness for him; swept, too, by fear of him; and the impact of these waves left her trembling before him. Some flash of portent, some premonition born of instinct, warned her with a clearness that was blinding. Tenderness and fear rolled in upon her, though her reason weighed them as equal absurdities. Then her look rose to the mother's portrait and she saw that the eyes had followed her: they seemed now to challenge, almost fiercely. Only the